A modern masterpiece of surreal graphic fiction
Our heroine, Carice, is visiting her husband she has something important to tell him. He s a diplomat, who s lying in hospital following a car accident. Stuck in a traffic jam on her way to the hospital, she abandons her car and sets off on foot on a journey that turns into a surreal trip. Imagine a David Lynch film co-written by Chuck Palahniuk, Jean-Paul Sartre and Milan Kundera. This edition of Pachyderme has a foreword written by Moebius.
A sci-fi tale which has all the echoes of a David Lynch film.
Almost cinematic in style, in the breathless opening to this graphic novel we get a traffic jam due to a wounded elephant; a blind pigkeeper; an alien-looking grey baby; a cavalier and alcoholic skirt-chasing surgeon; and a beanpole of a Swiss secret policeman.
Our heroine, Carice, walks from her car through the woods, as if in a trance, to a hospital to visit her diplomat husband, indisposed from a car accident. Her goodbye note, which she intends to deliver in person, is in her purse. The hospital is vast, remote, and foreboding, filled with suitable loonies.
The book s first third ends with Carice waking an apparently dead body in the morgue with her whistling. Chopin? the body asks. Carice nods. We learn of her too-early marriage, her dashed dreams as a concert pianist, and in the course of conversation realize that the aged cadaver she s talking to is her future self.
